Sports

Labour relations in baseball

Not so fast

THE media coverage of the death of Marvin Miller, the former head of the Major League Baseball Players’ Association (MLBPA), has been predictablyhagiographic. Much of the praise is justified. Following nearly a century of failed rivalleagues and legalbattles, Mr Miller’s canny collective bargaining led to the abolition in 1976 of baseball’s odious reserve clause—a system often comparedto slavery, which bound players to their employers and grossly reduced their wages. It is only because of his leadership that the majority of each dollar spent on baseball in the United States (in the form of tickets, broadcasting contracts or merchandise revenues) now ends up in the pockets of the athletes who provide fans with entertainment.

But the commentariat’s glee in reliving Mr Miller’s victory over the sport’s club owners—who made a futile effort to reverse his accomplishments by illegally colluding to hold down salaries in the 1980s—has obscured the more questionable aspects of his mixed legacy. Mr Miller was a lifetime union man, who toiled for the United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers before bringing his talents to the MLBPA. And he seemed to be motivated above all else by a single-minded determination to extract as big a share of the sport’s revenues as possible for his members. “If at any point the owners start singing my praises,” he once told the players, “there’s only one thing for you to do, and that’s fire me.” He could not have been more successful by this measure. But there is more to advocating for baseball players’ well-being than merely securing a bigger slice of the pie. And Mr Miller always privileged the interests of the game’s stars and veterans over those of its supporting cast and its up-and-comers.

Baseball’s economic structure today is roughly the same one Mr Miller negotiated in 1976. During the first three years of players’ careers, they are required to accept whatever salary (above the league minimum) that the team that drafted them is willing to pay. For the following three seasons, they still belong to the same club, but their wages are determined by an independent arbiter. After that, they become free agents, and can sign anywhere they wish.

This system is often cited as Mr Miller’s crowning achievement. The owners wanted to retain control over players for a few years, to recoup the costs of developing them. Mr Miller was more than happy to give it to them, since that would limit the supply of free agents coming to market every year and drive up their price. “It dawned on me, as a terrifying possibility,” he later wrote,

that the owners might suddenly wake up one day and realize that yearly free agency was the best possible thing for them; that is, if all players became free agents at the end of the year, the market would be flooded, and salaries would be held down. It wouldn’t so much be a matter of the teams bidding against one another for one player as of players competing against each other...What would we do, I wondered, if just one of the owners was smart enough to figure out the money they would save if all players became free agents every year?...All I can imagine is that they had such a fixation on power, such an abhorrence of the idea of the players winning any kind of freedom, that they refused even to consider an idea that clearly was in their own economic interest.

Mr Miller may have been right that this arrangement maximised total wages. But it also created a grossly unfair dichotomy among the players between haves and have-nots. Reduced competition among free agents is great for veterans. But it’s not great at all for young players, who are effectively still bound by the old reserve clause. Making it through six full seasons in the major leagues is no small feat, particularly for pitchers, who are highly prone to injury in their early-to-mid 20s. As I have noted in the New York Times, athletes whose stars burned brightly and briefly, such as Marcus Giles or Joe Magrane, never received a fraction of the wealth they generated for their employers. The union’s rank and file would be far better off if Mr Miller had dedicated more of his bargaining chips to pursuing sharp increases in the league’s minimum salary, or to challenging the amateur draft.

An even bigger black mark on Mr Miller’s record is his callous disregard of minor-league players, whose lives are downright pitiful. They earn as little as $1,100 a month, spend most of their time off the field on interminable bus rides and must work odd jobs in the offseason. To be sure, they are not members of the union. “We don’t represent them,” Gene Orza, a former lawyer for the MLBPA, recently told Slate, “and have no obligation.” But the Federal Labor Relations Authority might not agree. According to its guidelines, “an exclusive representative may not treat non-union members differently than dues paying union members in matters over which the union has exclusive control.”

In an interview earlier this year, Mr Miller dismissed the idea of unionising minor leaguers as unrealistic. “The notion that these very young, inexperienced people were going to defy the owners,” he said, “when they had stars in their eyes about making it to the major leagues—it’s just not going to happen.” But major-league players were just as sceptical of an adversarial relationship with their employers when Mr Miller took over the MLBPA in 1966, and he had little trouble converting them to his cause. Mr Miller’s treatment of the sport’s underclass makes the plaudits heaped on him as a tireless advocate of the working athlete ring hollow.

Moreover, that decision has probably left fans cheated, by reducing the quality of play on the field. Unlike basketball, a sport in which most elite players can easily be identified by the time they are drafted, baseball players take a long time to mature, and their careers are highly unpredictable. Less than half the players chosen first overall in the draft since 1965 have appeared in a single All-Star Game, and many of the sport’s greats were virtually ignored in their youth. The best way to produce great major leaguers is to have as many promising athletes as possible playing minor-league baseball for as long as possible, and then let the competition determine who rises to the top. By ignoring the plight of minor leaguers, Mr Miller was complicit in the construction of a system that has presumably forced the next Mike Piazza out of the game prematurely, in search of an occupation where one can hope to make a decent living.

Mr Miller left the MLBPA in 1982. But he remained outspoken about labour issues in baseball until the day he died, and his stature ensured that the union’s subsequent leaders would pay ample attention to his words. And his pronouncements during the past decade on performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) further sullied his reputation.

Ever the hardened negotiator, Mr Miller regularly advised the MLBPA not to accept stricter testing—or at the very least, to demand concessions from the owners on other issues in exchange for tolerating it. But the primary victims of steroid use were players themselves, who did not want to take PEDs but felt they had no choice in order to keep their jobs. Moreover, the biggest driver of athletes’ salaries is not how they split revenue with the owners, but the growth of the sport as a whole. And anything that could harm baseball’s popularity, such as the perception that it had devolved into a pharmaceutical arms race, was a mortal threat to players’ paychecks. Mr Miller’s narrow-mindedness put him on the wrong side of the most important issue in the game in recent memory.

Addendum: There’s been a lively discussion at Baseball Think Factory about the MLBPA’s obligations to non-members. I have two separate criticisms of Mr Miller in this regard. First, I think he should either have made more of an effort to unionise minor leaguers, or tried to expand the MLBPA to include them and their concerns.

Second, given that players outside the major leagues did not get organised, I think he shirked his duty of fair representation in regards to them. Although I should have been more careful to cite the National Labor Relations Board (which has jurisdiction over the private sector) rather than the Federal Labor Relations Authority (which handles employees of the federal government), the principle is the same. The MLBPA has exclusive control over a crucial issue affecting non-members: the amateur draft, which binds players to the team that selects them and sharply reduces their signing bonuses. Drafted players cannot sue the owners for collusion to hold down their bonuses, because the draft was collectively bargained with the MLBPA. The union should thus be obligated to represent those players’ interests. Instead, it has systematically sacrificed their interests in favour of those of its members.

Now, I don’t actually think a legal challenge on these grounds to the MLBPA would stand much chance of success. Unions have generally been given broad leeway to bargain as they see fit, and with good reason: we don’t want the courts second-guessing every move they make, and any compromise is going to leave someone unhappy. But just because non-members can’t get a court to force a union to do what they want it to doesn’t mean that the union leader should get a free pass in the press for selling them down the river.

For more data on the distribution of income among professional baseball players, check out Matthew Seybold’s follow-up research to this post.

Readers' comments

Are you as hard on non-union things? Like how the Fed or BofE manages? Or how companies work? I ask because the post is complete but dwells on the negatives as though the failure in the union context has some special importance. I don't think it does. I think Miller changed some stuff and other stuff resists change, kind of like the way the world works everywhere.

Again, unions are supposed to advocate on the entire class of workers represented by their bargaining, not just dues-paying members. Now, it would be an uphill legal battle for a minor leaguer to win a case against the MLBPA, and they would instantly become persona non grata among their peers. But that doesn't exempt Miller from criticism, in my view.

The MLBPA, like so many other unions, was established and fought its first battles for a good cause, namely eliminating the reserve clause. Again like so many unions, it is hard to see how the union benefits players in general now. Contracts are arrived at through collective bargaining between owners and a committee dominated by top players and their agents. Like most revolutions, one cossetted elite has taken over from another. The peasants continue to suffer.

Well... the MLBPA is the Major League Baseball Players Association. By definition, by the name, it clearly does not represent minor league players. So in one sense, you're complaining because they don't do what their name says they don't do.

At the same time, the treatment of minor league players cries out for someone to unionize them. Someone, say, with the stature people think Mr Miller had, rather than the stature that he actually seems to have had.

This is a well argued article and surely Miller or any of the professional sports unions is not above criticism but I sense an idealistic streak which is holding Miller up to egalitarian standards that are hard to find outside C19th - early C20th labor unions in the west. This sounds to me like the equivalent of the skilled workers getting the better of the unskilled. The other lingering question in my mind could Miller have done more faced by the greed and power of the owners?

Much was left unsaid here. First, baseball has no hard salary cap, like the NFL has. This entices high-income teams to bid up salaries. The salaries of average baseball players who reach free agency would make NFL all-stars cry. Second, baseball contracts are guaranteed for their length - again, unlike the NFL. These two facts have been huge for baseball players, who see football players cut every year before their contracts are up. NFL contracts are essentially a series of single-year contracts, with varying degrees of practical 'guarantee' to them, with each passing year lessening the strength of the guarantee. And lesser players, with smaller signing bonuses and cap costs have little if any guarantee beyond their first year's payment. All baseball players would look askance at such conditions.

even if you assume PEDs are at worst, harmless, the MLBPA's complete lack of interest in keeping them out of their sport is an embarrassment. rather than using it as a closely guarded bargaining chip, the MLBPA should have been leading the charge to rid the sport of the them. the owners reaped the benefits of the post 90's strike home run record chases but now the players are shouldering the fallout from the fans and media.

not representing the minor leaguers is another problem, but one, as you note, is endemic to all unions. the failure of leadership regarding PEDs is a black mark Miller and his successors earn all on their own.

Marvin Miller made autos back in the day with the parts manufactured by the Schaeffler Companies. The Schaeffler Company is a German family owned company that manufactures the ball bearing and other parts for new cars.

Mr. Miller's fixation on veterans was well founded. First, veterans have public visibility and popularity, an important thing in the crucial years when sports unionization resonated badly with the public. Second, securing generous contracts for veterans raised all boats, including the minimum wage. Third and related, the arbitrators (for players in years 4-6) quickly lined up behind salary offers/demands resembling those of free agents (years 7+).
Finally, a technical point: the reserve clause wasn't overturned; the jointly chosen arbitrator ruled that it pertained to one year of automatic right to renew by management, as opposed to management's interpretation that the renewed contract, itself containing the reserve clause, could be renewed for one year ad infinitum.

Agree in public sector the senior public sector union that catters for incudling head of departments , council chief executives nhs mangers Union leader is on the civil service commison. A clear conflict of interest.

Because the word union is used it accepted. But if the heads of department paid a lobbiest to be on the civil service commions then this be frawned on.

In effect all the senior public sector union is a paided lobbiested. For economic rent and private interested to be represented. To me seems Undemocractic as not considering the public or good of the uk as a whole as may expect commison to do, but has a joint role as union leader.

Also could impact complaints.

The unions including senior did not support equal pay for eaqual work but speical interests such as 2 tier contracts paid different rates for same work.

When as suggested that these groups are here for some "good" this does not seem the case in pratice.

The unions are a paid interest groupd like an insurance company or lobbiest.

When i cimplained to union about illaly dicriminstion having contract canelled they said could be there members so not interested. Much in a similar way in fact when complained to MP when had contract canelled at scottish government, they said civil service are "there people" as mps in the office was complaint about.

if people want bad efficncy inequality special interest rent seeking weak system that lacks intergrity and robustness then unions are way forward. As they collective bargining for special interest groups comes at expensive at public and other people. T

I dont know about american sports unions other than what i read here but certainly dont get that impression with british public sector unions.

A couple of years ago the civil service went on strike over the coalitions changes to the compensation scheme. The compensation scheme is when a civil servant is made redundant.

Some civil servants could recive as much to buy a house porsche turbo under old rules. While others recive the legal minumum. It would depend what contract was on if on a NUVOS the legal minum. If on classic the larger payments. Even if someone was on NUVOS for 30 years they would still get legal minuim.

The union has negotated zero above the legal minium.

May civil servents went out on strike over the goverments proposed changes to make the system equal for everyone. Means people in nuvos would be 1000s better of.

Even people on nuvos went on strike, the union did not make clear that these people would be worse of under unions favoured outcome against the government.

In effect NUvos people went on strike to maintain worse condidions this is fair enough if to maintain solidarity for a two tier dicrsimintary wage system.

However many people did not know that unions postion would make them worse of. Well not many people in pub.

The stike was lost and now people on nuvos are on an equal footing with others and have far above the legal minium.

The BBC did not explain the irration stikers the union did not say.

Many people were unware that stiking.

The civil service commioners consist of a sitting union leader. The unions are part of management to extent.